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Wednesday, September 28, 2011

I put "write a blog" on my to-do list today and I really like checking things off my to-do list, so, here I am...

Most of the stuff that has been whirling through my head over the past 10 days would probably make for exceptionally good reading, but this isn't the forum for those thoughts just yet so..

um...

I like Starbucks oatmeal. They give you brown sugar and nuts and stuff. And you can get a grande tea and oatmeal for exactly $5. Breakfast of Champions, bitches.

Fleet Foxes make pretty music. I wish I made pretty music. I write pretty words sometimes. Do you write pretty music? Do you want to be my Johnny Marr?

I haven't listening to The Smiths in a while. I need to do that. Also, have you seen that video of David Tennant dancing to "Boy with the thorn in his side"?

Yeah, I just stopped writing to go watch that on youtube. This video is probably my favorite thing in existence. Watching David Tenant lip sync to the Smiths makes me tingly in all my naughty nerdy parts.

doobie doobie doo... I wonder what's going on at twitter right now...

Sometimes twitter makes me feel like I'm back in high school:

There's the popular kids: The celebrities and quasi-celebrities that you have crushes on *cough* @nerdist *cough* and really hope they'll read a tweet and think you're awesome and then they'll follow you on twitter and fall in love with you and you'll have lots of nerdy babies you can teach to speak klingon and what? I mean, um...

And there's the indie/artsy kids: not exactly celebrities but they've got awesome twitter feeds and have lots of followers and they write a groovy blog where they talk about crocheting and leading the revolution from their studio apartment and you just know they smoke clove cigarettes and wouldn't give you the time of day but still you tweet at them thinking maybe you won't embarass yourself and maybe you can become hip by association.

And then there's me, and probably a lot of you, with 28 followers (many of which I know are not real people) I have a day job and a cat. And sometimes I write little pieces of fiction that other people like. Can you stand all that glamour? Every time I tweet at someone I don't really know I kind of feel like I'm asking them to prom.

I'm 30, a "grown-up" who pays her bills on time and has people who love her. So why do I keep signing up for social experiments that make me relive the most awkward and debilitating, humiliating, depressing, moments of my existence?

Why? Lean in and I'll tell you a secret. Deep down underneath all the awkwardness and insecurity and fear, I really do think that I'm cool. Ok, well maybe "cool" isn't the adjective I'm looking for, but you know what I'm damn funny and somewhat entertaining and sometimes i'd even go so far as to say interesting. I have a twitter account because, fuck the adolescent fears that just won't die, I'M AWESOME AND THE WORLD SHOULD KNOW.

Which, I'd wager, is why you have twitter too.

This blog was brought to you by Fleet Foxes, celebrity crushes, writer's block, and caffeine. Yay, caffeine.

When we were kids if we didn’t do what we were told or didn’t do it well enough there were repercussions, like detention or being grounded or not getting that shiny thing we were so sure we couldn’t live without. As grown-ups if we don’t do what we’re told or don’t do it well enough we get fired and and they stop giving us those lovely paychecks we use to pay for things like the house we live in and the food we eat and if we don’t get someone else to give us and job and start doing what they tell us we end up down by the river fighting with plastic sporks to defend our cardboard box and collection of Barbie dolls heads we found floating in the muck.

If they had told us this when we were kids none of us would have made it past 23.

Growing up, daydreaming about being a writer, I imagined book tours that let me travel the world and have exciting adventures with interesting people, signing books for adoring fans and generally being fabulous all the time. I imagined days filled with hours and hours of writing. Back in the blissfully ignorant days of my youth when I imagined being a writer I imagined being a writer. That’s it. I didn’t imagine I’d be spending 40 hours a week doing other stuff for money and squeezing in writing in the few glorious moments I had a couple of brain cells to spare and wasn’t lured by the siren call of pizza, booze, telly.

What my 7th grade English teacher should have told me when she was encouraging me to be a writer was: “You should be a writer, you’re very good. But the most important thing you need to know, more important than writing every day or wearing sunscreen, is that you’re gonna need a fucking day job. And you’re just going to have to deal with it. You’re not going to get a million dollar book deal right out of college and be able to live the life I’m sure you’ve been imagining. You may never actually make any money for anything that you write and you know what? You’re just going to have to bend over and take it. If that doesn’t sound like something you’re up for you should maybe consider reevaluating your dreams.”

She didn’t do that so here I am, 30 years old, nursing a cold mocha at Starbucks on my day off, and trying not to think about the fact that I have to go back to work tomorrow. Still, this is what I want to do. As long as some of my words make it out there to someone I’ll continue to bend over and take it from the powers that be in exchange for a paycheck.

If Ms. Seventh Grade English Teacher had warned me instead of encouraging me to continue writing and giving me a pretty little journal at the end of the year I may have given the path I was on a serious rethinking and given up the long and winding road to literary obscurity in order to pursue the much more sensible dream of Broadway Stardom.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Do you have any idea how excited I was about this show 2 months ago? And now? Now, I’m just sad. This should have been the most insanely awesome season of Torchwood the world has ever seen.

I loved the darker sexier little brother of Dr. Who when the series premiered. I adore Captain Jack and fell in love with his new cohorts. The show was charming and disturbing, heart breaking and funny. And Welsh. Oh how I miss Ianto and his beautiful Welsh accent. Then came Children of Earth and it was dazzling. Torchwood completely stepped out of the shadow of Dr. Who stood on its own, and blew me completely the fuck away. I waited for 2 years, nearly burning up with the anticipation. What could possibly top this???

Nothing, apparently.

Torchwood: Miracle Day makes me mad, in much the same way that I infuriated most of my teachers growing up. So much potential, so much promise, and yet…

I put off blogging about Miracle Day until it was done hoping beyond hope for Mr. Davies to pull something out of his magic hat that would make me jump back from the screen and flagellate myself for ever having doubted him. I’m still waiting.

I don’t know what happened. They did everything right. They staffed the show with entirely fantastic writers. There is not a single person credited with writing Miracle Day that I wouldn’t kill to learn from or work with. But it just didn’t feel like Torchwood.

Jack and Gwen felt like slim Slitheen wearing Jack and Gwen suits. Esther and Rex didn’t engage me. I still don’t understand why Oswald Danes was there. The only character that grabbed me at all was Jilly.

My boyfriend and I have pretty much decided that Miracle Day might actually have been kind of wonderful if they had edited it down to 3-5 episodes. Also, Also, the reason Jack is immortal isn't because of something special or hinky in his blood but because Rose FREAKIN Tyler decided that he should be a fixed fucking point in time. He never should have been able to have been made mortal and shouldn't have been able to bestow Rose's gift/curse onto anyone else!!! Deep breath in...and out... and nerd rant over.

I don't want to be an armchair quarterback here. Who am I? I have a blog. Oooooh aren’t I just the Big Bad? No. No, I’m not. I’ve written one novel that couldn’t even get past the interns at a single Lit Agency, and a few pieces of flash that have made their way out into the world via online lit mags. That’s it. I’m just a blogger.

After the first couple of episodes the evil blogger in me did want to spew vitriol and tear the whole thing down. But that’s not what this is about. This is me showing my virtual therapist about where the bad man touched me.

This season, it’s like date rape. I invited Torchwood into my dorm room because we had grown to be such good friends then Miracle Day slipped a roofie into my solo cup and I woke up with crabs.

Did I go too far there?

I arrived at Starbucks with the intention of starting the rewrite of my novel with it’s new narrator, so I thought I better blog instead. I wish this post had a purpose, some conclusion to share with you, some piece of enlightenment to add to the world and elucidate truths about the creative process and the journey of mankind so that if anyone who ever watched or worked on Miracle Day happened to stumble upon this blog they would walk away from the computer feeling a bit of closure and hope. It doesn’t. Not even a little bit. So, instead, I leave you with this:

**this picture was shown to me by Patrick Scaffido who is a whiny bitch and wanted you all to know that I didn't find this on my own.